2012

2009
Director: Roland Emmerich
Cast: John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Oliver Platt

Plot: An epic adventure about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors.

Crust Displacement is Worse Than it Sounds
by C. True

In the special effects department 2012 is the apocalypse movie to end all apocalypse movies. My eyeballs literally hurt during this movie from being forced so wide open for so long. Some of the catastrophic delights you’re in for when watching 2012: earthquakes that leave giant canyons running through LA, Yellowstone National Park bubbling and exploding into fireballs (!), at least 3 scenes where small planes must be flown through either exploding land or buildings and giant tsunamis that take out the everything from the White House to Tibetan monasteries! And it all looks great! I mean really great! Particularly the scene at Yellowstone, in which the earth seems a thin film on top of a boiling soup and huge areas of land rise and fall in liquid motions before exploding into even more dangerous earth-cannonballs of fire and destruction. As you may have already gathered this movie really does shamelessly cram all possible disaster scenarios into one with the loosely defined “Crust Displacement” explanation. At first it’s discussed as crust dissolution, but that’s not quite right and there is some talk about the shift of the magnetic poles but this per se doesn’t really seem to affect anyone. Crust displacement does cause giant tsunamis, sometimes lava explosions sometimes dry explosions and sometimes the much punier giant earthquake. Also some areas of the earth seem miraculously unaffected while others like Hawaii are totally decimated. My suggestion for added destruction is that crust displacement also causes all meteors to be attracted to the earth so we could have meteors falling down while people try to outrun/fly the earth explosions and massive flooding. Trust me it would have fit right in and you would have loved it. The limited scientific explanations really fit the purpose of the film, as the consequences are far more important than the cause (the American People never even hear the words crust displacement).

The great and bad part about 2012 is that all of the catastrophes mentioned above all happen together within the span of probably 30-45 minutes. This makes for an awesome first half of the movie and is probably one of the reasons it seems so much more impressive and disastrous than other movies in this genre. The downfall of this is that we have to put up with a super shoddy plotline full of some of the worst sentimental crap of all time for the second half of the movie. (SPOILER) I don’t see any reason why the President would not take the opportunity to outlive the apocalypse and try to help rebuild his people and society afterwards. But instead he stays and makes crowds of injured people uncomfortable by walking around and saying things like “I’ll find your daddy.” Towards the very end there are some laughable dramatizations of how we just HAVE to try and save those last 400 people. The evil apathetic US leader, played by Oliver Platt, says no, it is not wise to try and save these people because it will probably end up killing everyone and really if you’re showing up for a seat on the Arc that will save all of humanity maybe you should have shown up half an hour early. I couldn’t have agreed more, issue resolved. But instead we have a 10 minute saga about how we’ll lose our humanity if we don’t try and save those people. Well you didn’t try to save the entire Earth did you? In fact only the superbly rich and powerful even know the Arcs exist, so the lets not start worrying about morality now.

No catastrophe movie would be complete without its relatable everyday family you follow throughout, which, in this case, was an exact rip off of the broken family in War of the Worlds. Parents are divorced, son is angry at dad and then son learns to trust and believe in dad blah blah blah. This is the least developed family of any end of the world movie I've seen and that's saying something. They aren't underdeveloped on purpose either, we have to spend a lot of time with them and yet there is never any dialogue or development that makes us wonder who they are or what they'll do after the end of the world. But you aren't going to see 2012 to learn about family values, you're going to watch the earth implode and explode at the same time and in that department I can't imagine anyone being disappointed.